The challenges of rural water supply: a case study of rural areas in Limpopo Province

Abstract

The majority of rural areas in South Africa are experiencing the challenges of accessing water services because they cannot afford to pay for municipal services. However, the Water Services Authorities (WSA) and Water Services Providers (WSP) are entrusted by the Department of Water Affairs (DWA) with the task of ensuring that everyone in the country, including poor households who cannot pay for water services, have access to at least a basic level of service (defined as 25l per person per day) at no cost. It is also acknowledged that most municipalities predominately serving rural communities face a number of challenges in supplying these communities with at least basic level of service. Through the study “Accelerating Sustainable Water Services Delivery (ASWSD)” funded by the Department of Science and Technology (DST) a number of challenges in relation to water services were identified for both WSA and WSP. Challenges identified in the selected villages included the availability of water sources, administrative challenges, issues that relate to policy, and political interference. For many rural communities water sources and infrastructure are available, but not maintained, as a result become unusable and thus non operational. It was also clear from the study that lack of capacity within municipalities has a way of impacting negatively on issues of operation and maintenance and other issues required in facilitating service provision, leaving municipalities unable to attend to these challenges as they would like to. The study concludes that rural municipalities are struggling to provide services to communities as per constitutional mandate, and thus a lot more work and effort need to be put forward to ensure that the function of providing services is undertaken and that the goal of ensuring access to water services is attained as expected.